On Theatre E-Book

Charles Dickens.

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: On Series
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 167

Beschreibung

On Theatre

Leseprobe

‘on’

Published by Hesperus Press Limited

19 Bulstrode Street, London W1U 2JN

www.hesperuspress.com

Foreword © Sir Richard Eyre, 2011

Introduction and notes © Pete Orford, 2011

Selection © Hesperus Press Limited, 2011

This collection first published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2011

Designed and typeset by Fraser Muggeridge studio

Printed in Jordan by Jordan National Press

ISBN: 978-1-84391-617-8

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Foreword by Sir Richard Eyre

Introduction

On Theatre

The Amusements of the People

Astley’s

Private Theatres

Mr Wopsle plays Hamlet

Mrs Joseph Porter

William Charles Macready

Two Views of a Cheap Theatre

Speeches for the General Theatrical Fund

Notes

Biographical note

Foreword

‘I’ve never much enjoyed going to plays. The unreality of painted people standing on a platform saying things they’ve said to each other for months is more than I can overlook.’ That’s John Updike, and it is an attitude that is shared by many novelists. For me, of course, Updike misses the point. It’s the re-creation that animates the art and makes it unique. Anyway, all art forms are unreal in some sense: they have their formal rules and conventions, novels just as much as paintings. A woman once said to Matisse, ‘Surely the arm of this woman is too long?’ to which Matisse replied, ‘It’s not an arm, madam, it’s a picture.’ Like Updike, she’d missed the point.

Theatre thrives on metaphor. Things stand for things rather than being the thing itself, a room can become a world, a group of characters a whole society. It invokes the astonishment of the unreal, the strange, magnified, proportions which occur naturally in childhood. In the theatre fallibility goes hand in hand with immediacy. It happens in the present tense; it’s vulnerable, changeable, maddeningly so sometimes. I like the sense of occasion, the event, the participation in a communal act. That’s what Dickens liked as well.

Dickens writes vividly about the experience of theatre-going in The Amusements of the People. It’s a sympathetic description for the reading classes of the dramatic entertainments enjoyed by the working classes: ‘heavily taxed, wholly unassisted by the state, deserted by the gentry, and quite unrecognised as a means of public instruction’. He visits the Victoria Theatre (now known as the Old Vic) and watches plays which are simple moral fables underscored with music – melodramas, in fact. His imagined common man, Joe Whelks, ‘is not much of a reader, has no great store of books, no very commodious room to read in, no very decided inclination to read, and no power at all of presenting vividly before his mind’s eye what he reads about. But, put Joe in the gallery of the Victoria Theatre; show him doors and windows in the scene that will open and shut, and that people can get in and out of; tell him a story with these aids, and by the help of live men and women dressed up, confiding to him their innermost secrets, in voices audible half a mile off; and Joe will unravel a story through all its entanglements, and sit there a long after midnight as you have anything left to show him.’

It’s a description that seems familiar, not of audiences in our contemporary theatres, but of audiences at the movies – at Star Wars, say, or Indiana Jones or Avatar. While Dickens has much fun at the expense of the entertainments on offer to Joe Whelks he never patronises him. Far from it, he makes an argument familiar to anyone who has proselytised for public funding of the arts, that ‘There is a range of imagination in most of us, which no amount of steam-engines will satisfy’ and that imagination is stimulated by the theatre’s demands that the audience enter in an imaginative relationship with the events on stage.

In Two Views of a Cheap Theatre he admiringly describes the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton, ‘erected on the ruins of an inconvenient old building in less than five months, at a round cost of five-and-twenty thousand pounds’ with a capacity of ‘two thousand and odd hundreds’, with excellent sightlines, superbly equipped, ‘spacious, fireproof ways of ingress and egress’, well served by attendants, and provided with ‘convenient places of refreshment’. And cheap. In short, an ideal popular place of entertainment which presents pantomime and melodrama to one audience on Saturday night, and a tub-thumping evangelical preacher on Sunday evening to an entirely different constituency.

The Victoria and the Britannia theatres were two of many not licensed by the state. There were only three ‘legitimate’ institutions (those with a royal patent): Covent Garden, Drury Lane and the Haymarket. These were the homes of ‘serious’ theatre, the only ones permitted to perform spoken drama, which meant largely classical plays, more often than not Shakespeare. Unlike the Victoria Theatre, where the audience was ‘squeezed and jammed in, regardless of all discomforts’, class demarcation was rigidly enforced, with separate entrances for each section of the house so that wealthy box-holders would not have to share the same entrance as those headed for the benches in the pit or the gallery.

The Covent Garden Theatre was run by Dickens’ friend Charles Macready, the great actor who had succeeded Edmund Kean as the dominant star of the London stage. He seems to have been a sensitive and intelligent actor, and as producer he commissioned a number of new plays and staged most of the Shakespeare canon, restoring the original ending to King Lear for the first time in over a hundred years. In a (slightly risible) poem honouring him after his death Tennyson said:

Thine is it that the drama did not die.

Nor nicker down to brainless pantomime

In his reviews of Much Ado About Nothing and King Lear, it is clear that Dickens also admired Macready’s refusal to ‘nicker down’, praising his acting and his staging with affection and undisguised partiality – the sort of critic one craves with unalloyed envy.

It is possible that Dickens took a vicarious pleasure in Macready’s success. After all, he had himself tried to be an actor. As a young man he had obtained an audition for Covent Garden and, at least according to him, it was only a bad cold that prevented him from going. That diplomatic illness might speak of self-knowledge – he knew he would never be a good or successful enough actor to satisfy himself or the public. Or he knew enough about acting to know that it requires more than a propensity to show off, more than a knack for dazzling your friends with your stories, and more than a dizzying simulation of self-confidence. However, it never held him back him from performing his work in public and engaging in extensive and elaborate amateur dramatics.

Like many novelists (Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Grahame Greene) to whom it seemed a tantalisingly easy way to make money, Dickens made several attempts to write a successful play. Of his four efforts only one, The Strange Gentleman, was a (modest) success, both in London and in New York. Despite this, Dickens disowned it a few years later. The Village Coquettes was a transparent attempt to mimic the popular successes of the day: a historical romance, an operetta, and a failure. His third play – Is She His Wife? – was a one-act farce about marriage, and his fourth was a satirical comedy written on commission for Macready and rejected by him. After this he renounced the professional theatre, just as Nicholas did in Nicholas Nickleby.

Dickens’ novels demonstrate why he could not write well for the theatre: they are florid, discursive, reflective, overflowing with descriptive passages and prodigal in their excess of images, their profusion of characters, their galleries of grotesques. None of these attributes lend themselves to writing for the theatre, which is a distilled form of writing in which characters have to be introduced by sleight of hand rather than description, where each action has to follow another in a way that appears inevitable, where everything must appear to have happened rather been engineered – all of which must be achieved by dialogue and action alone.

If Dickens’ writing is incompatible with the theatre, film is the opposite. Many if not most of his novels have been successfully translated to the screen. Eisenstein told his students that if they wanted to learn how to write a screenplay they should look at any page of a Dickens novel. It is a paradox, given that his novels should be so filmic, that his characters so frequently seem so ‘theatrical’, but throughout all his writing it is his empathy with his audience and his sense that life is all performance that radiates with such an alluring heat. Like an actor who needs to keep an eye and an ear on the public even at moments of high passion, Dickens always wants to make contact, to entertain and, above all, to receive the applause that is the actor’s reward at the curtain call.

As he says in a speech to raise money for actors in hard times: ‘I dare say that the feeling peculiar to a theatre is as well known to everybody here as it is to me, of having for an hour of two quite forgotten the real world, and of coming out into the street with a kind of wonder that it should be so wet, and dark, and cold … by all these things I entreat you to not go out into Great Queen Street by-and-by, without saying that you have done something for this fleeting fairyland, which has done so much for us.’ Dickens’ unaffected admiration infuses all the pieces in this book.

– Richard Eyre, 2011

Introduction

It is 1832, and Charles Dickens is going to be an actor. As a young man of twenty with dreams of the stage, his application to the stage manager George Bartley is reciprocated with an invitation to audition before him and the actor Charles Kemble at Covent Garden Theatre. However, on the fateful day, illness prevents young Dickens from attending. Given that he will now proceed to become the most popular English novelist of all time, that missed audition will prove to be a pretty good career move. But his fascination and interaction with the theatre does not diminish, and through his writing he will continue to convey and share that enthusiasm with the reader.

Dickens’ relationship with the theatre took a number of forms; though he never turned professional, he continued his dreams of acting through amateur performances in a number of contemporary and classic plays. The most obvious impact of these was during the now infamous performance of Wilkie Collins’ The Frozen Deep through which he met his alleged mistress Ellen Ternan, but in addition to this prominent bearing on his private life, it is fair to say that all of his dramatic ventures would prove a key influence on his writing. His experience of acting was an integral part of his creative process; he often rehearsed characters’ speeches aloud when writing his novels, and it has been argued persuasively that Dickens’ later forays on the stage for his public readings were as much about acting, if not more so, as simply reading from the page. Dickens’ writing style was perfectly suited to dramatic performance, and the page was simply another stage for him. His successful reading tours were effectively one-man dramas that electrified audiences, and drew upon Dickens’ long-researched observations and understanding of the stage.

But ultimately Dickens’ most vibrant connection to the stage was as an audience member. He visited the theatre regularly, as will become evident from the articles in this collection, and when he edited the memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, Dickens freely confessed his ‘strong veneration for clowns’ and celebrated the ‘ten thousand million delights of a pantomime’. For Dickens, good drama, like good writing, constituted and celebrated what was best about humanity; it not only entertained, but enriched the soul and heightened emotion. Central to this notion was the figure of William Shakespeare. Dickens and his friend John Forster would celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday every year, and the bard’s works are repeatedly quoted and drawn upon in Dickens’ text. King Lear and Cordelia provided the inspiration for Dombey and Flora, for William and Amy Dorrit, and, most famously, for Little Nell and her grandfather. It is not surprising then that Dickens became such firm friends with the celebrated Shakespearean actor William Charles Macready. Macready’s revivalist production of King Lear, which dismissed the happy ending of Nahum Tate’s adaptation and restored the death of Cordelia, proved to be a great influence on The Old Curiosity Shop. It is fitting also that Dickens should have chosen to dedicate Nicholas Nickleby to Macready, when it contains the stereotypical actor figure of Mr Crummles. Dickens’ treatment of the Crummles family is indicative of his response to theatre as a whole, as it oscillates between bemusement and awe, recognising the community of actors whilst lampooning their petty squabbles, and celebrating the majesty of a theatrical performance whilst reporting on backstage politics.

To be certain, Dickens’ love for the theatre did not blind him to its absurdities, and in this collection we can see the dual attitudes of Dickens to the sublime and the ridiculous in drama. The opening article, ‘The Amusements of the People’(1850) takes great delight in giving account of the bizarre melodramas being acted out in London theatres at the time, and the same tone can be found in ‘Astley’s’ (1835), concerning the theatre of the same name, primarily famous for its circle which allowed horsemanship and circus acts to be shown as well as conventional theatre; in both articles the audience offers Dickens as much source of entertainment as does the play. The vanity of the actor, and the lure of fame, is then explored in ‘Private Theatres’(1835), in which Dickens looks at the phenomenon where anyone could pay to be an actor for the night with prices relative to the size of the part. The potential for comedy in amateur performance, surely something Dickens must have been aware of in a self-deprecatory light, is also explored in the excerpt from Great Expectations (1861), in which Pip and his friend Hubert visit Pip’s old acquaintance Mr Wopsle in his breakthrough performance as Hamlet, and in ‘Mrs Joseph Porter’ (1834), in which Shakespeare is once more mutilated by the eager yet untalented Gattleton family.

Yet these articles also express an appreciation of theatre, for all its foolery; and in the remaining articles of this collection we can see Dickens’ admiration for the theatre truly shine. His reviews and thoughts on Macready offer a personal (and subjective) reaction to the work of his friend, as well as a more wide-reaching viewpoint on the majesty of both Shakespeare and theatre in general. In ‘Two Views of a Cheap Theatre’ (1860), he compares two nights in the same theatre: on the first, a pantomime and melodrama is shown; on the second, a sermon is preached. It allows Dickens to once again consider the importance of educating the audience as well as entertaining it: the controversial practice of preaching in theatre was condemned by many as compromising the solemnity of the scripture, yet Dickens favoured it as a positive step aimed at educating the lower classes through a readily available medium. Indeed, in this argument Dickens foretells modern reactions to television and its potential for offering informative programming rather than cheap, sordid entertainment, although it is important to recognise that even while preaching this message, Dickens enjoys the many merits of the pantomime and melodrama as much as he does the sermon.

The final selection in this anthology is an assortment of Dickens’ speeches to the General Theatrical Fund. Given Dickens’ frequent involvement in a variety of charity work, it is unsurprising that he took an active role in helping actors in need, championing the fund and its efforts for retired actors of all range and popularity. But Dickens’ involvement with the fund has secondary roots beyond his quest for social justice, inasmuch as it also reflected his enthusiasm for theatre: his long association with the fund not only allowed him to give something back to the dramatic profession, but to further celebrate what he termed ‘the sacred bond of charitable brotherhood’ which the stage offered, a brotherhood that he felt very much a part of.

The feeling was reciprocated: Dickens’ own works were regularly adapted for the stage by other writers both during his lifetime and after, sometimes before the final chapters of the books themselves had been written. Dickens responded to these adaptations with a mixture of bemusement and horror; on one occasion he rushed to see the actor Fredrick Yates to stop him ‘making a greater atrocity than can be helped of my poor Curiosity Shop, which is “done” there on Monday Night’, and even after giving advice to Yates and his fellow actors, Dickens’ pessimistic summary was that ‘The thing may be better than I expect, but I have no faith in it at all’. The production, like many other adaptations, was a success, with good reviews, and the consistent translation of Dickens’ works to the stage in his lifetime reveals the shared interests of his readers and the theatre audience; indeed, the shows thrived on the popularity of the books and Dickens’ fan-base to boost ticket sales. Moreover, it betrays not only each book’s dramatic potential, but their dramatic narrative, replete with moments of pathos, melodrama, caricature, comedy and tragedy characteristic of the nineteenth-century stage. Thus Dickens influenced theatre just as theatre influenced him.

Whether lampooning its more ridiculous aspects, or championing the sublime, Dickens never loses his enthusiasm for theatre; after all, though ‘Private Theatre’ mocks those ‘idiotic donkeys’ who eagerly take to the stage, it must be remembered that Dickens himself was just as guilty of dabbling in drama. Furthermore, while he applauded those plays that offered good moral teachings, neither was he dismissive of simple melodramas or circus shows, and the impact they could have upon an audience. The everyman Joe Whelks in ‘The Amusements of the People’ has few books and less inclination to read, but he absorbs culture through the theatre, and, as Dickens remarks, ‘these people have a right to be amused’. Ultimately, for all his sarcastic observations, the simple lure of the theatre could not escape Dickens. In one of his speeches for the General Theatrical Fnd, he reflects on ‘the feeling peculiar to a theatre […] as well known to everybody here as it is to me, of having for an hour or two quite forgotten the real world, and of coming out into the street with a kind of wonder that it should be so wet, and dark, and cold, and full of jostling people and irreconcilable cabs’; while in ‘Astley’s’ he refers to the actors as ‘mysterious beings’ whom he refuses to think of outside the theatre ‘in threadbare attire [and] the comparatively un-wadded costume of everyday life’. This veneration for the wonder, and escapism, of theatre lies at the heart of Dickens’ affection for it, and the infectious passion of the actors was nothing compared to that of the audience, within which there formed another brotherhood. Above all, Dickens’ writing testifies to how the world of theatre could offer a moment of relief in the drudgery of the workaday life; for a writer so enamoured by the fantastic as Dickens, theatre could never fail to hold his attention.

– Pete Orford, 2011

On Theatre

The Amusements of the People